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You can buy Make Room! Make Room!...Here You can find out more about Harry Harrison...Here 240 pages.
The planet's population has exploded and resources are stretched to breaking point. And, in a sweltering, overcrowded New York City of 35 million desperate inhabitants, a police detective must try to solve a murder. The basis of the cult film Soylent Green, this eerily prophetic novel is a nightmarish vision of a world in meltdown.
I read this book as part of the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. Click here for details. This week's prompt was a book with a similar plot to another book. However I have made a faux pas here. Make Room! Make Room! is the book that the 1970s film Soylent Green is based on. There is a famous revelation in the film.
Spoiler Alert stop here if you do not wish to know what that revelation is!
In the film it is revealed that the mass produced, processed food that everyone eats is actually human flesh. So I assumed the book would be similar so that I could partner it with Tender Is The Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica which deals with a similar industrialised cannibalism theme. Bit creepy I know but the aim was to diversify my reading. So far so good but I had a surprise to find out there is no cannibalism in Make Room! Make Room! (MRMR.) Never thought I'd ever say "I was left deflated by the lack of cannabalism in a novel" I don't know if by diversifying my reading I am becoming a more rounder person or more dark and depraved!
So sadly lacking in mass canabalism but this is a terrfying picture of the very near future. Most dystopian novels, such as 1984, Farenheit 451, Brave New World et al, focus life after the event that caused society to collapse. MRMR paints a slow motion, blow by blow account of the collapse of civilisation and it's seems very real and very near and for that reason is terrifying.
In MRMR massive over population the world over due to lack of birth control has resulted in all the world's resources such as food, water, fuel being on the verge of exhaustion. Meat is an astronomically expensive luxury. It can only be obtained via shady underground dealers known as "Meat-Leggers" akin to our drug dealers. Set in New York, huge numbers of people sleep in squalor on stairwells and in decaying abandoned cars in parking lots. Cars abandoned because there is no fuel. refuse collects in the street, water is rationed. Riots and crime are rife. In this sprawling metropolis we pick out the story of Billy a young man forced into theiving. He robs the wrong apartment and kills local crime boss Mike. Shirl the gangster's moll is left with nowhere to go and ends up living with Andy, the investigating officer and his room mate an ageing army veteran named Sol. Shirl struggles with living in poverty. All the while Andy is trying to chase down Billy.
While the plot is ok, its characters really only serve only to give an insight into a society collapsing under its own weight.
The scenes with masses of people everywhere in my mind reminded me of recent trips to London over the last few years. I live in West Wales in a rural county with no cities and only two small towns, not too populated and plenty of natural and beautiful open spaces. When I go to London and travel amid the masses with no natural greenery, lack of personal space, no room on the pavement it makes me uncomfortable. I was shocked when on an escalator on the underground crowded with people, some people were walking or running up and tutting (and worse) because I did not know the city etiquette of standing on one side to allow these people to pass. They thought me rude or possibly weird. I in turn thought how sad their lives must be that must they run up a crowded escalator. When I read MRMR these memories came back and when I imagined a little scenarios like this, but upped on steroids, I could easily picture the chaos the author was after.
Disclaimer I fully appreciate that someone from the city may feel uncomfortable in my neck of the woods too.
The book was published in 1966 and the novel was set in 1999. Fair play the author got a lot bang on. Scarcity of resources, escalating costs, ever decreasing quality of life and so on. However the main driver of these issues is climate change not overpopulation. Climate change was unheard of in 1966. Ironic now that depopulation in the next few hundred years will be a bigger problem than overpopulation. That's if climate change grants us a few hundred years.
I found this to be a fascinating book. Like watching a car crash that I may be involved in one day.
One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and burned it and it's gone now.
After the damp hallway the heat of Twenty-fifth Street hit him in a musty wave, a stifling miasma compounded of decay, dirt and unwashed humanity. He had to make his way through the women who already filled the steps of the building, walking carefully so that he didn’t step on the children who were playing below. The sidewalk was still in shadow but so jammed with people that he walked in the street, well away from the curb to avoid the rubbish and litter banked high there. Days of heat had softened the tar so that it gave underfoot, then clutched at the soles of his shoes.
It was hard to get your hands on cash money, and cash money was the only thing that counted. They never saw any at home. The Welfare ration cards took care of everything, everything that kept you alive and just alive enough to hate it.
On the end of a string they carried their prize, a large gray dead rat. They would eat well tonight. In the center of the crowded street the tugtruck traffic moved at a snail’s pace, the human draught animals leaning exhaustedly into their traces, mouths gaping for air.
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Harry Max Harrison (born Henry Maxwell Dempsey; March 12, 1925 – August 15, 2012) was an American science fiction (SF) author, best known for his character the Stainless Steel Rat and for his novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966). The latter was the rough basis for the motion picture Soylent Green (1973). Harrison was (with Brian Aldiss) the co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. Aldiss called him "a constant peer and great family friend". His friend Michael Carroll said, "Imagine Pirates of the Caribbean or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and picture them as science-fiction novels. They're rip-roaring adventures, but they're stories with a lot of heart."
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